Senior benefits platform Renew.com raises $3 million to help retiring baby boomers

Renew.com has raised $3 million in Series A funding from Venrock, Expa and others to launch a platform aiming to give the baby boomer generation adequate information on their benefits after retirement.

American companies started to shift away from pensions and healthcare benefits packages for retirees in the mid-1980s, leaving the last bit of the boomers without the same compensations their parents enjoyed at the sunset of their careers.

Add that to the fact that roughly 10,000 people in the baby boomer generation are expected to retire each day between now and the next decade and you can imagine there’s a lot of work about to go into helping them with the shift to their golden years. Renew says it wants to help baby boomers get the right benefits for them.

“Retirees used to leave work with a host of benefits… They now leave with a cardboard box with a few picture frames from their desk,” co-founder Kevin Nazemi told TechCrunch.

Nazemi built Renew.com with his friend Tony DeGangi after seeing how difficult the transition was for many of the people using a site he previously co-founded, Oscar Health.

“The consistent thing was everybody was confused — including my mother, who’s a doctor herself,” he said.

Nazemi wanted to create something he’d feel comfortable sending his own parents to. But the real market for the company is in getting human resource personnel to tell transitioning employees about the site.

Though it might not be much of a struggle to sell HR on the idea. As Nazemi explains, the transition often takes up a lot of time and resources in that department. Also, it’s not ideal for retired employees to get on COBRA as it’s costly for the company and the retiree.

How it works, once the employer agrees to use the site as a resource, is the retiree signs up on the site and then the employer sends a lot of the retiring employee’s info to Renew. Renew then curates a list of recommended benefits to suit the retirees’ particular needs. The retiree then chooses the package they think works best for them and Renew walks them through the process to get set up.

The site is free to both retiring employees and to the employer, but, similar to Zenefits and other cloud benefits platforms, Renew makes its money off brokerage commissions.

So far the startup has hired a team of 20 in Venice Beach, California to build out the brand. It plans to roll out its initial product in the latter half of 2017.

WTI, Madrona, Refactor Capital and various other angel investors also participated in the round.